Brian Doherty: The Ron Paul Revolution

Book excerpt: The Ron Paul Revolution in America

Rudy Giuliani couldn’t believe his ears. That scrawny old nut at the podium down the row had just said what? There was a reason America was attacked on 9/11? And it had to do with America’s own behaviour?

“That’s really an extraordinary statement,” Giuliani said, with some swagger. It was May 15, 2007, at a Republican presidential debate in South Carolina. Giuliani was in control. The former New York City mayor was front-runner of the Republican pack, and ahead of any likely Democratic opponent in the polls. But this barely polling former third-party candidate at the podium was attacking Giuliani’s home turf — the 9/11 assault on America, and what it meant.

“That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September eleventh.”

The crowd was on Giuliani’s side, raucously, giving him cheers and whistles and resounding, rolling applause.

“And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that,” Giuliani continued.

If this obscure, unaccomplished, backbench legislator actually wanted to contend for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, Giuliani thought, he’d back down, pronto. Sputter some mealymouthed, face-saving scramble and hope this whole exchange was forgotten by the pundits and the voters.

That wasn’t going to happen. The man, Ron Paul, from southeast Texas, then veteran of over nine terms in Congress looking too small for his suit, his ears almost laughably prominent, delivered his heresies neither hesitantly nor militantly, but with the authority of common sense. Paul knew what he meant, meant what he said, and given the chance, just explained himself further — or further dug his grave with the potential voters he was supposedly there to win over.

“I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback,” Paul said. “When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.”

We have a problem? America doesn’t have problems, pal — America gives problems! But this Ron Paul guy kept marching ahead into this dangerous, uncharted territory. “They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were — if other foreign countries were doing that to us?”

Whoa — a history lesson, recognizing consequences to our actions, an empathetic approach to what the rest of the world might think? What could any of that have to do with American foreign policy, or an attempt to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination?

This Ron Paul character hadn’t been doing very well in his “quixotic” (that’s what everyone said) run for the nomination so far in May 2007, and this surely was the end. Even many of his fervent fans, much as they enjoyed hearing him say it, were sure he’d just murdered his campaign.

One young man who thought he was past caring about electoral politics was idly watching the debate in Los Angeles. This made him sit up and take notice. “Ron Paul, without a f—ing friend in the world, nothing but hostility aimed at him from all directions, stood his ground and did not back down. Just reiterated his points even stronger. I was blown away. I felt at that moment that the world changed forever, that there had been this massive shift in reality and what could happen. From that point forward I became involved.” Jon Arden, who worked at Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles, started donating money to the campaign and going to Ron Paul Meetups (local groups of Paul fans who’d gather to promote Paul). Suddenly, making and hanging Ron Paul signs, talking about Ron Paul to anyone who’d listen and some who wouldn’t, became Arden’s passion. “All my time, money, anything I could spare, I devoted all of it to Ron.”

Arden’s was the most emphatic and impassioned version of that story I heard, but I encountered variations of it dozens of times from Paul fans: That spat with Giuliani, rather than derailing Ron Paul’s progress, was the engine that propelled it to greater speed. This was the moment that turned Ron Paul from an easily ignorable distraction in the Republican race to, well, a more-difficult-to-ignore distraction. Still, most mainstream media and politicos continued to try to ignore him. But Paul’s online poll results began to soar; the number of people watching and making videos promoting him on YouTube and joining his meetup groups zoomed. The second quarter of 2007, in which that exchange occurred, saw Paul raising only $2.4-million. But in the next quarter, after Giuliani supposedly dispatched him handily, Paul pulled more than twice that, $5.3-million. And that wasn’t the end of his momentum.

Ron Paul has been alive and kicking in American politics for a long time. He’s served three separate stints in Congress as a Republican representative from Texas, beginning in 1976, and is still there now in 2012. He’s even run for president before — with the Libertarian Party, in 1988. He came in third (but with fewer than half a million votes).

By any sober estimation, suggesting at a GOP debate, just six years after the airplane assault by radical Islam on American icons, that our foreign policy mistakes disturbed hornets’ nests and we shouldn’t be surprised we got stung should have meant Ron Paul would be alive and kicking no more.

Despite that moment’s aura of legendary bravery to so many of his supporters, Paul remembers the spat with Giuliani lackadaisically. Paul has understood the world a certain way for a very long time, and not much surprises him. Having observed him since 1988, I’d say the only thing that’s surprised him has been his own success in winning supporters as a presidential candidate. “My immediate reaction was, I couldn’t care less,” Paul says. “I’m here to tell what I think is the truth. I didn’t think lightning was going to strike, that I was going to be president, but oh, this brought me down. It was just what I’ve been up against for thirty years. No different. It was just being verbalized in all the booing, but that didn’t affect me. You know, I guess it’s too bad they are booing me, but that’s the way it is.”

“People wanted to interview me right afterward, to ask me if I was going to drop out. What would I drop out for? They said this is the end for me. No one knew it was just the beginning. Kent [Snyder, his campaign manager] whispered to me, ‘Guess what? You are winning the after-debate polls.’ ”

Giuliani, unwittingly, had helped launch the Next American Revolution.

That revolution has continued, past Paul’s being trounced by John McCain in the race for the 2008 GOP presidential nod. Paul did outperform his sparring partner Rudy handily, though — Giuliani only managed to beat Paul’s vote performance in three states.

Paul is a remarkably successful politician made of contradictions. Though a longtime Republican congressman, he’s built his reputation on such wildly liberal stances as ending the drug war, halting wars in the Middle East and scuttling the Patriot Act. Despite this, in 2010 and 2011 he’s won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the seedbed of young right-wing activists.

He’s got traditional conservative bona fides, too. He’s for ending the income tax and killing the Internal Revenue Service, and for stopping illegal immigration; he also thinks abortion should be illegal. Despite this, right-wing politicians and thought leaders from Giuliani to Bill O’Reilly to the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol deride and despise him.

Paul’s appeal is a curious mixture of populist and intellectual. He attacks the elite masters of money, banking and high finance at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. But his philosophy on politics and economics was forged through decades of self-driven study of abstruse libertarian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and the Nobel Prize–winning F. A. Hayek.

He’s a staggeringly successful politician by some measures — the only congressman to win a seat as a nonincumbent three separate times. He continues to be re-elected to the House election after election, almost always by a higher margin than the time before. He does this while violating most traditional rules of politics. He doesn’t strive to bring home the bacon. His 14th District in Texas is highly agricultural, rife with rice and cattle farmers, but he always votes against federal agriculture subsidies. In a district with 675 miles of coastline, struck violently in 2008 by Hurricane Ike, he votes against flood aid and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — even calling for the latter’s abolition on national TV. He vows to never vote for any bill for which he doesn’t see clear constitutional justification. Yet by some people’s standards of a “successful legislator” he’s a bust — nearly every bill he introduces never even makes it out of committee.

For decades Ron Paul remained an underground hero to a national constituency of hard-core skeptics about government, the one successful politician steadfast even on the less popular aspects of the live-free-or-die libertarian philosophy. He’d talk about ending the drug war in front of high school students. In 1985, he spent his own money to fly and testify on behalf of the first draft registration defier to go to trial. Paul didn’t blanch when confronted with the hot-blooded youngster’s use of the phrase “Smash the state.” He might not use that verb, smash, the sober obstetrician, air force veteran and family man said. But from his experience with how the U.S. government disrespects its citizens’ liberties, he understands the sentiment.

Paul’s popularity has not waned since his presidential failure in 2008. It was since then that he began winning straw polls at CPAC. A national advocacy group pushing Paul’s ideas, called Campaign for Liberty, arose from his campaign and raised $6.1-million in the off-election year of 2009 — nearly three times what it raised in 2008. The organization Students for Ron Paul from that campaign evolved into Young Americans for Liberty, which now has 289 chapters and more than 3,000 dues-paying members, and a network of 26,000 activists to call on.

Giuliani was supposed to have killed him. John McCain was supposed to have killed him. But with Paul’s predictions of trouble arising from America’s overreach, foreign and domestic, seeming frighteningly prescient since the economic collapse of 2008 — the continuing fall of the dollar, “peace candidate” Obama bogging us down further in Afghanistan, achieving an (incomplete) Iraq pullout only on George W. Bush’s schedule, and starting a new war in Libya — Ron Paul is as alive as he’s ever been.

Paul’s supporters are alive and growing as well. His presidential campaigns have created the most lively, energetic, dedicated and varied group of devotees for liberty that America has seen in living memory. They will cover the ground with homemade Ron Paul banners hung every place legal and illegal they can clamber; they will take to the air in blimps and balloons to promote their man; they will colonize and dominate every crevice of the Internet for him; they will ride their bikes across the country and turn from anarchist to Republican for him; they will run for office because he suggests they should; they will give more money, quicker, than any other political base in history. They are homeschooling Christians and couch-surfing punk rockers, college professors and famous actors, computer programmers and national TV hosts, drug-dealing anarchists and U.S. senators.

They are the Ron Paul Revolution, and they are changing the shape of American politics.